Twitter to Version its Ads API

In response to developer feedback, Twitter will soon add semantic versioning to its Ads API so that developers can more easily deal with new and deprecated features.

According to Twitter's Jacob Petrie, the popular social platform makes numerous changes to its Ads API every month. Wherever possible, it tries to maintain backwards compatibility when making changes, but every year, some changes that are breaking are introduced.

Starting later this quarter, Twitter will version the Ads API, exposing both the major and minor version. Backwards compatible changes, such as the addition of new attributes to a response object, will result in a bump to the minor version number, while significant or breaking changes, such as the removal of an attribute from a response object, will result in a bump to the major version number. For example, a minor change would result in the Ads API going from version 2.1 to 2.2, while a major change would result in the Ads API going from version 2 to 3. Developers are required to specify the version of the API in the URL of their requests.

"Due to the nature of the changes we often make to our Ads API, developers only need to request the MAJOR version they’d like, as all changes will be backwards compatible," Petrie explained. "So that developers can track what has changed between MINOR versions, we will return the current MAJOR.MINOR in the response headers and include change logs of each in our developer docs on dev.twitter.com."

In addition to its new versioning scheme, Twitter also announced that it will support deprecated versions of the Ads API for 90 days instead of 30 days.